


Battered

by thepistachioman



Category: Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-03 23:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10977924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepistachioman/pseuds/thepistachioman
Summary: The Amaranthine Wardens compare scars. One-shot.





	Battered

Kristoff-Justice sniffed derisively at the vodka in front of him. “I do not think this is a good idea.”

Oghren belched. “Go on, Fadey. What’s it gonna do, kill you?”

The spirit shook his head and Lena Mahariel saw a tendon in his neck tear a little. “Spirits are not affected by alcohol. I believe. But this body’s digestive system is not functional. I do not know where the liquid will go.”

Lena reached over and took the vodka from him, throwing it back in one smooth motion. It was tart and strong on her tongue, but there was no rush, no buzz that was supposed to happen. Bloody Grey Warden stamina. “Having a dead man follow me around is bad enough. I don’t need you to be leaking vodka as well.”

She scratched under her chainmail vest. They were all thick with mud from the Blackmarsh, but after the Fade she wanted nothing so much as to reach the point of hazy forgetfulness somewhere between the sixth and seventh bottle of Ferelden rye. Fighting that dead sorceress-demon-thing had brought back awful memories from Lake Calenhad, oozing demon ichor and the cloying sweetness of Sloth’s breath. She wasn’t sure if Oghren was as affected as she- she didn’t think he’d been sober for most of the Fifth Blight, after all, so any memories he had were likely fuzzy and pleasant- but Anders, Nathaniel, Sigrun and even Velanna had all had that sickly pale look in their faces, and so she’d made straight for the barrels in Vigil’s basement.

Now they were sitting in the Keep’s courtyard around a wooden door propped on two casks, warmed by the fires in the smithy and lit by a couple of grimy candles. The wine the Orlesians had brought with them had disappeared within two nights of her arrival in Amaranthine, but Nathaniel had found them his father’s secret stores. Even if the Vigil was besieged by the darkspawn for a year, they wouldn’t lack for liquor.

Nathaniel leaned forward and rested his hands on the makeshift table, bumping his knee on the cask. “Maker, imagine going to that bloody marsh alone. Brave bastard.”

He was already tipsy, she noticed- Grey Warden or no, he was a lightweight. His words were beginning to slur and she saw him stealing glances at Anders when he thought the mage wasn’t looking, of which Anders seemed entirely unaware- except for the slight smile he kept flashing in Nathaniel’s direction.

Velanna shivered. Her arm was strapped in a sling, a gift from one of the many reanimated dead that had been wandering the marsh. “If I never return there, it will be too soon.” She, like Justice, hadn’t touched her drink.

“It’s all right, Velanna. Vodka won’t kill you.” Lena had had the same reaction when Alistair had first offered her his aleskin after some particularly rough blight-dreams. Dalish didn’t drink alcohol- at least, she’d never seen any in the clan- but then, most Dalish didn’t have to ever see a broodmother. “And it’ll help with the pain.”

Oghren snorted. “That little fleabite? Listen to you, Warden. When I got shot by that ballista in the Deep Roads it was  _ if you can walk, walk it off _ .”

Sigrun slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Oghren, that’s just Legion medicine.”

Lena grinned. “I wasn’t Commander back then. Now I have to look after my troops.”

“That never happened,” Anders said. “No-one walks away from a ballista.”

Nathaniel’s eyes glinted. “I think we need proof, Oghren.”

The dwarf scoffed. “All right, kid. No dwarf calls me a liar.” He stood and, not without difficulty, unstrapped his heavy plate pauldrons. He pulled his lambswool tunic aside to show his hairy shoulder, a thick patch of scar tissue showing where the ballista bolt had punched through his armour. “That, little Wardens, is the sign of a  _ real _ warrior. And I showed that ballista too. Carved it into a box of matches, just to teach it a lesson.” He flexed his arm and the scar twisted and shone an ugly red in the candlelight.

Anders sniffed. “I stand corrected. Why were you walking in front of a ballista in the first place?”

Oghren sat back down, his plate jingling. He downed his vodka, belched again, and growled at the mage, “Because it  _ got in my way _ .”

Lena almost laughed at that. It wasn’t entirely true, naturally- Oghren had wandered off to piss in the lava one night as they made camp, gotten lost and found himself with his breeches down in the centre of a darkspawn fort. If she and Alistair hadn’t had such trouble sleeping with the Taint singing in their ears they’d probably never have found him.

“Well, magey-boy, top that story?”

“I’m a spirit healer, Oghren. If I had scars, it’d mean I wasn’t doing my job.”

Oghren scoffed. “You mages are mad, you know that? Who’d want to remove a scar? They’re important!”

Nathaniel looked at Anders doubtfully. “You mean you don’t have any? At all?”

“Well, I have one- it’s not a scar, as such,“ Anders cut himself off, his ears going red. “And it’s not something anyone wants to see.”

“Come on, Anders. You have to show us now.” Nathaniel turned appealingly to Lena. “Commander, you can order him to show us, right?”

Lena shook her head. “I’m not getting involved in this. Anything under Anders’ robes is his own business.”

Anders blushed properly now. “Look, I’ll tell you the story and you can decide if you still want to see, ok?” He paused, downing the rest of his vodka. “I was making a hot-air balloon- this was my sixth or seventh attempt to get out of the tower. I had a harness, and it was supposed to attach here-“ He pointed to his shoulders and down around his waist-“and here, but the templars surprised me while I was getting in. So I had to jump. It wasn’t pleasant.”

Nathaniel frowned. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, Howe, that I had one strap twisted in between my legs, and nothing else to keep me from plummeting seventy metres to the lake. ”

Nathaniel winced. “Ok. Yeah, I get the picture. You poor bastard.” He toyed with his cup for a moment. “So, was there any, um, permanent damage?”

Anders snorted. “No. I’m a wonderfully lucky fellow. Velanna, how’d you get that scar on your collarbone?”

They all turned to look at the elf. Lena could just make out a strangely shaped line of scar tissue on the elf’s shoulder. Seeing the looks they were giving her, Velanna tugged the collar of her robes up and folded her hands primly on the table..

“I don’t think that is any of your business.”

Nathaniel made a dismissive gesture. “We’ll blindfold Oghren, if you don’t want to show it. Just tell us the story.”

She turned to Lena, her face set in a hard line. “You don’t condone this, do you, Commander? This kind of drunken debauchery-”

Lena grinned at her wryly. “It’s not the Dalish way, is it? But we’re not particularly Dalish anymore, Velanna. And it sounds like you’ve got something to hide.”

Velanna huffed a sigh. “Oh, very well.” She pulled the collar of her robe down, revealing the strange semicircular shape of the scar.

Anders whistled. “That must have been awful. When did you do it?”

“And how? Was it the darkspawn? Demon tree?” Sigrun interjected.

Velanna looked away, pulling at her sleeve. “Isn’t the scar enough? Do I have to say?”

The others all looked at Lena. “Fine. Rules are, you don’t have to tell the story unless it’s very exciting or very embarrassing. And you get to choose who goes next.”

Velanna swore under her breath, then said, very quickly, “I got kicked by a halla from my old clan. Happy?”

Sigrun frowned. “What’s that? Is it like a bronto?”

Ohgren burped sagely. “Only faster, more cunning, and with great ugly antlers. Terrifying things. Who’s next?”

Velanna looked a little mollified that none of the Wardens- except Lena, of course, and she wasn’t saying anything- knew that halla were about as cunning as baby lambs. “Oh, I don’t know. Justice?”

Kristoff’s burnt eyebrows twitched into a frown. “Spirits do not suffer ailments as you mortals do. And this body is dead. Surely that disqualifies me.”

“Hey, I’m dead too, Justice. You can’t get off that easily,” said Sigrun.

The spirit sighed. “Very well.” He reached down and pulled off one of Kristoff’s plate vambraces. Lena saw part of his arm where the flesh had begun to rot away, and a shiny plate of exposed bone.

Anders groaned in disgust. “Maker, Justice, that’s foul. We’re trying to drink here.”

“It actually looks  _ dead _ ,” Nathaniel said. “Can you feel anything in that?”

Justice twitched away from him. “Yes. It feels like it is rotten. Do you still wish to see more? Else I would hear of Sigrun’s exploits in battle.”

Sigrun perked up, grinning. “Oh, I’ve got you all beat. Legion of the Dead trumps Grey Warden any day.” She reached down and pulled off her heavy boot, waggling her short toes on the makeshift table. There was a long burn all along her right foot, pale and twisting around her ankle and up her calf. She grinned, looking around at all the others for their approval.

Oghren reached over and poked the disfigured flesh. “How’d you do that?”

“Darkspawn emissary, fire breath, boot to the face. This one’s better, though-“ she reached around and undid the back of her breastplate, pulling her undertunic up to reveal two massive blotchy marks on her back. “Ogre teeth. Nearly cut me in half.”

Lena heard Velanna gasp, leaning forward onto the table. “How did you get out?” she asked, then saw the looks the others were giving her. “What? I can be interested.”

Sigrun waved a hand at her. “Oh, getting into an ogre’s mouth is way harder than getting out. But now it’s the Commander’s turn, I think.”

Lena was silent. She remembered the ogre in the tower of Ishal pummelling Alistair with its great horned fist, remembered leaping in to save him and the impact of its clawed toes as they ripped through her chainmail and carved a lattice of scars into her torso. When she’d woken up in Morrigan’s room she hadn’t quite believed that she was looking at the right body, that the witches hadn’t switched her chest onto the wrong person.

Then there were the ropy scars along the veins on her right arm where Uldred had tried to rip the blood from her veins, the raised lines on her cheek that was her memento from those werewolves in the forest, the cracked burns along her thigh from the high dragon in the Temple, the jagged scars on her throat that Avernus’ mixture had burnt into her. By now she had so many scars that, when she saw herself in the fancy Orlesian mirror in her quarters, she could barely see her old vallaslin.

“C’mon, Commander, I bet you’ve got more than the rest of us put together. There has to be at least one good story there.”

When Lena had joined, she’d assumed the Wardens were just like any other shem order, not much different than knights or chevaliers or Templars. She’d been wrong. As a rule, the Wardens were battered, broken warriors fighting a desperate losing battle.

And, for an elf that was beginning to feel awfully like a collection of scar tissue held together with a little skin and a lot of magic, that was her kind of people.

Lena stood and unbuckled her surcoat. “Oh, yes. Have I ever told you what an archdemon claw feels like on the inside of your intestines?”

 


End file.
